More Babies Likely For Overseas Adoption As China Opens Agency
The Age
Monday November 16, 1992
The first Government-run adoption agency to open in China since 1949 is expected to see an increase in the number of Chinese babies adopted by overseas parents.
Childless couples from the United States, Australia and other developed countries have come to China in recent years in the hope of being able to adopt one of the country's tens of thousands of orphans and abandoned children, only to find themselves trapped in an inefficient, inept, corrupt system.
One successful adoptive Chinese-American mother said last year: ``People make up the law as you go." Others have tried and warned ``don't".
Paradoxically the new adoption law enacted on 1 April this year cut the number of adoptions to a trickle. It prompted a surge of inquiries from overseas but according to Ms Cheng Yan, one of the new adoption agency's staff of six, only 30 adoptions have succeeded since April.
The new law had the unintended side-effect of making it more frustrating and bureaucratic for interested foreigners, according to a report earlier this year in the `China Daily', which said the number of adoptions had dropped from as many as 2000 a year.
Figures in this area are rather suspect. Estimates of the number of Chinese children in welfare institutions range from 8000, says the `China Daily', to more than 600,000. Official reluctance to discuss a figure suggests the problem is very large.
Ms Cheng said there were three categories of children; orphans, abandoned children and those whose natural parents had difficulties bringing them up. The official policy of one family, one child, creates a terrible temptation to abandon a less-than-perfect baby or dump a healthy girl, in the hope of getting a male heir next time.
Unwanted infants are left in rail and bus stations and alleyways. If found alive they end up in welfare homes, a stillbirth is declared and the couple tries again for the longed-for boy.
Many more girls than boys are abandoned. Ms Cheng said all 30 adoptions since April were of girl babies, the eldest five years, the youngest three months.
In Chinese society there is a great deal of informal ``adoption", but with the cultural emphasis on blood ties the idea of adopting an unrelated baby is looked on askance. Attitudes towards formal overseas adoption are also ambivalent. The Government does not want to give the impression it cannot care for its own children, or worse, is selling them abroad. The cultural importance of ties to family and by extension homeland, militate against opening the orphanages, where the number of abandoned waifs serves as a poor reflection on the one-child population policy, already severely criticised outside China for its draconian implementation.
Many children in the homes are severely handicapped, but others have only minor defects.
Ms Cheng said adoptive parents must be over 35, have no child of their own and preferably be of Chinese origin.
© 1992 The Age